Friday, June 13, 2008

Sometimes

When I am snagged into reading the abundant commentary on sites such as Silliman (here the men discuss Sex & The City) and Poetry Foundation etc, I think I can hear women lifting the untidy cuffs of men as they sit formulating and formulating opinion after opinion on opinion after opinion, wiping the floor around them and leaving plates of cheese and fruits, and sometimes great lines, and insights along with a shot of creme de menthe.

Where do they get the time, one wonders? Where to do they get the time?

plus a number of other women who write less frequently. i am also an avid blogger, blogging a few times a week.

all of the above blogs are full of opinion and information. where does one find the time? that's a mystery. but i can say that i see many, many women blogging and they seem to have opinions too. i know i do. i don't think opinion is a particularly gender based phenomenon and it certainly isn't limited to males; witness television shows like Oprah or the View.

thanks for the reminder about Dim Sum - I'm going to add that to my blog links. time is a big factor for me - the time i spend blogging or writing reviews (fewer and far between) means less time writing. i've been silenced as a woman writer in myriad of ways which is why i began blogging - to 'take up space.'

thanks for the links to the Dim Sum blog, Lemon :)i sometimes wonder if i'm the only woman who doesn't feel silenced or victimized by anyone. no one could ever silence me even if they wanted to; i get plenty of attention for my writing, no one has ever told me to stick to writing women's issues; i have never been treated in any way but supportively by my own literary community. gender bias has never gotten in the way of what i have wanted to do in literature. when i read posts from other women i feel either lucky, ridiculously naive or strangely out of place. when i see an author's name on a piece of writing, i don't know if the person identifies as male or female or any other gender. it simply doesn't matter to me; what matters is the writing itself. if it's good, i'll enjoy it; if it's boring or poorly written i won't. c'est tout. ( i deleted my last comment because it was riddled with typos!)

I can't speak for anyone else about where they get the time. But I get mine the same place I find (more like make) the time to read, and re-read, for example, Still & Otherwise and Lemon Hound (the book, as well as this blog).

Though you could rightly say that I ought to find and read Slip instead of taking the 30 seconds I did to give Ron a jab for publishing without warning about a dozen spoilers about the stupid movie.

ribbons and patterns and baking and language and time to invest like investing time is and lack and making up for and moving forward and back and back and sideways or maybe underneath and twisting and waiting and boating and boating some more and sleeping. And then there's being. All we have is time. We choose what to do with it.